Searching visually and by reading level

A few times recently I've found myself searching and searching with students for good information. It has made me realize I haven't been modeling and teaching search skills enough for students to own a broad group of search strategies. These are two tools I'm really liking right now:

Instagrok is a visual search tool that creates a searchable mind map of ideas connected to your search term. It also allows you to search by reading level, gives key facts, and resources in various formats. (Thanks to Jason Kadonaga and his students for re-introducing me to this tool)

After seeing Instagrok found Google's reading level filters shown below. I'm not sure I would have listed this Encyclopedia Britannica article as "basic", but I did find some resources here that I was able to recommend to a student.

What search tools do you use? How do you teach search skills?

Initial Thoughts on the BC Science K-9 Draft Curriculum

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/7369410/BC_Science_K-9_Draft_Curriculum_%28Dec_2013%29
Curriculum Documents: https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/

I'm curious to see and hear how people respond to the Draft BC curriculum. Its great to see the Ministry of Education opening channels for public to provide feedback regarding the curriculum too (https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/). I hope we get a sense of what the people of BC think of the changes.

I took some time recently to try digest the Science section of it and condensed it all onto 11 by 17 sheets as seen here. The wordle above illustrates the emphasis within the Science Curriculum. For me the phrase "competency driven and content based" captures the essence of the new drafts perfectly. The shift in emphasis is no doubt dramatic.

After pushing into Project Based Learning in a Bring Your Own Device environment I see all kinds of opportunity in this new curriculum for my own practice. I see the competency driven nature as a stronger structure with which we can continue to develop Educate citizens with the core knowledge and core competencies to be leaders of tomorrow.

What do you think about the change? Have you given feedback to the Ministry?

PBL Learning Team

A group of Teachers met today at Kelly Road to discuss Project Based Learning. We've ordered BIE's PBL Starter Kit as a resources and will be working through that together as a way to inform and evaluate our practice. We've also started a blog dedicated exclusively to the group. Its online here. 

One of the things we did was share our questions. Here's what we came up with:

• What questions do we have?
• How does PBL work?
• How does PBL benefit our students?
• motivation
• engagement
• success
• building core competencies (thinking, communicating, personal and social competency)
• Definition of “The Educated Citizen” (we heard this recently and understand its in the BC school regulations, but do not know where)
• literacy and numeracy foundations
• understanding rich content
• core competencies
• How do we cover curriculum through PBL?
• What is “true PBL”, is there “true PBL”?
• How much information is required before students jump in?
• How much Teacher Direction/ Guidance is needed?
• How do we facilitate and let students drive?
• What role do driving questions play?
• How do we come up with really good driving questions?
• What skills and experiences do students bring to projects?
• How do different disciplines come together in projects?

We agreed its the highlighted questions that matter most. Its the difference this way of learning makes in the lives of our students that matters most. We want to be intentional about evaluating our practice based on the difference it makes for students. We are excited to be learning together!

What questions do you have about PBL?

cross posted at: http://sd57learning.blogspot.ca/

Cross Curricular Competencies

BC is transforming education, and it's an exciting and curious transformation to be a part of. After seeing the draft "cross curricular competencies" early on, my Teaching partner and I started working them into our practice. With our students we defined the competencies and built assessment rubrics for each one. Throughout the year students assessed their own growth in each competency using evidence from their project work. The work was very rewarding and the conversations were rich. The competencies allowed us to broaden our conversation and the bridge the skills students were gaining both inside and outside our classroom with the work they were doing within it. For me the quote "concept-based and competency-driven" frames the new curriculum perfectly, and it's a model I can get behind.

From my perspective yhis "transformation" in BC been a very open process, and it has been intentionally welcoming to the voices of British Colombians. I have had the privilege of joining the conversation on communication competency at a district level with a curriculum design team. Our team is one of three meeting in the province to give input into the creation of a communication competency continua. A draft of our work is shown here (https://www.dropbox.com/s/uexp3gx6gmg74w4/sj-sept16%20copy.pptx) and the document explains the possible structure and content of the draft continua. Our goal is to create a tool that will help students grow in their communication competency through descriptive, illustrative statements and examples of communication competency. 

BC has invited everyone to join the conversation on curriculum transformation here: https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/, but if you have an comments on the communication competency work I'd love to hear them too.

Will this support learners in improving their communication skills in all subject areas and at all grade levels? What more does it need? How can it be improved?

Thanks for your input!

Talk of Change - Embracing Project Based Learning

change_thoughts, a photo by MMcDonough on Flickr.

I gave my first Professional Development workshop yesterday on Project Based Learning (PBL). While I've talked to Colleagues, Parents, and Community members about PBL, this was my first chance to have a deeper, focused dialoug with educators about PBL. 

I was very cognizant in putting it together that I wanted to create opportunities for rich conversations and sharing of ideas, activities, and strategies. I borrowed and adapted questions from David Truss's presentation "7 Ways to Transform Your Classroom". The questions participants discussed together and shared thoughts on were a powerful part of the day, in my opinion. 

Selling anything, though, is not easy. As George Couros points out, we need to be strategic if we want to help others embrace change. George poses three questions that we can answer for Educators as we present change. Let me share my thoughts on them as it relates to PBL:

• How will this save me time?
• Such a valuable question for Educators. I want to acknowledge that adopting and settling into new Teaching practices takes time and energy, we all know that. For me the investment pays off in the product, and we'll get to that in a minute. In my experience the payoff with PBL is in two places. First, I save time preparing discrete tasks. My projects are almost always chunked into pieces that stretch over 2-6 hours of class time. So, once students are engaged in a new activity we roll with it for a few days, allowing me to do much more guiding, facilitating, informal breakout workshops, and formative assessment. Secondly, I save time in assessment. PBL lends itself beautifully to AFL practices that look a lot like students developing ownership by understanding where they are at and where they are going in their learning. This requires coaching and practice, but does not require that I collect small pieces of work daily, or even every few days to document the small steps in their learning journey. I should say to that my context is also a BYOD program. This saves a huge amount of time for me photocopying discrete tasks. I've moved my project outlines to Google Drive so students have current (and ever-changing) copies shared with them and they can be set up to comment on the outline or even edit as needed. 
• We need to focus on different, not more
• Yes. Some of the shifts I've been cognizant of in my practice as it related to PBL are in the ways I synthesize and summarize information, share resources, and share my expertise. As I move to PBL I fully desire to shift my instructional methods from Teacher centered to Learner centered. It strikes me as odd that so often we stand up and synthesize and summarize content for students. We need to teach students to synthesize and summarize content. If we are too worried about covering the content to let the students summarize it for themselves then perhaps we are trying to cover too much content (and I don't mean to get too involved in the debate over covering content here, I am more interesting in suggesting that this is one way that PBL is different and not more). My argument on resources is very much the same. Students need to be able to effectively find and critically curate content online. We are doing them a disservice if we find it for them, and we are doing them an even greater disservice if we do not teach our students to use a variety of resources. So we shift from finding and curating and sharing resources for our students to having them find, curate, and share their own resources. Lastly, PBL comes with a shift in expertise. Methods of Inquiry seek to involve community and experts outside the school. Although I'm not there yet in my practice, efforts to do this have been rewarding. I believe the same can be said about the learning community that exists within the classroom. Prensky writes about a Partnering pedagogy where we are all Teachers and we are all Learners. We need to shift our practice enough to allow students to embrace the roll as the experts that they are and are becoming.  
• Is this better?
• I believe so. In the presentation I respond to the "Why?" question with three arguments: because of shared experiences, because of shared findings, and because of shared understanding of best practice. There's a lot to unpack there, but I'll leave that to the presentation itself. After reading Couros's post the piece of this I feel I missed was the way in which its better for me. Ultimately I am most satisfied as a Teacher when the Learners I'm working with are most satisfied in their Learning. To that end, yes. PBL has allowed for deeper, richer, more meaning learning for my students and left me more satisfied in my Teaching!

Do you agree? What burning PBL questions are on your mind? Does PBL save you time? What shifts has it come with in your practice? Is it better for you and your students? What conversations are you interested in having as you consider change?

Consumption Project

https://plus.google.com/photos/104665354261133320564/albums/5854582620766544849?authkey=CI39pPz3lf6FzwE

Project Outline

As I look back at this project there are some things I liked about and some things that need overhauling.

Liked:

-students engaged in quality research and fact finding to determine the rate at which a resource was consumed by a certain population at a certain point in time

-students were thinking critically about his to represent their model so as to bring the Math to life by picking a quantity that would be significant (for a certain population at a certain time)

-the project points to the global theme of sustainability

-models were engaging

-choice of topics, methods of modelling increased engagement

Bigger and better next time:

-sustainability is such a deep and far reaching theme, I want to make sure to do it justice in a project like this. I'm not sure exactly how to approach that, but for starters I'd either look at sustainable practices with respect to either the food industry or energy sector (rather then leaving the option open)

-again, to better serve the sustainability theme I want to make sure this project culminates in a real, applicable, significant prouduct. This could, perhaps, be something like a marketing project and pitch to a local restaurant. It would be really cool to get a sense of what a restaurant needs and how we can help th market themselves, or to help raise awareness of sustainable food choices 

-I could see using a question like "How do our consumption habits impact others?", or perhaps even making this more specific like "How does Canadian consumption of coffee effect Ethiopia?", but I'm not sure how the socials ties would be made, and that relationship may likely dictate the scope of the question and inquiry.
-as with other projects with a physical product, I've seen that getting into researching, drafting, and revising a model design early really pays off in the end. Along these same lines a goal I've been thinking of lately is to really improve the quality if sketches. I want to see students think through and prepare well for their sketches so they can approximate their product as well as possible. I wonder if a strategy here would be to have students actually prototype a scale sketch or model before constructing their final product.

How does Technology Mimic Biology?

https://plus.google.com/photos/104665354261133320564/albums/5854593459971173873 

Last year we rolled out an Optics Project where students made pinhole cameras. It was hugely successful in terms of engagement and motivation. We loved the iterative nature of pinhole camera design. Build - shoot - develop - tweak - shoot - develop - repeat. Excellent! The project was a bit of a hodge podge of activities that didn't all fit seamlessly into a bigger broader question or inquiry. Although I continue thinking about this project, I'm not rolling it out again yet so I haven't yet re-drafted last year's project.

Here's last year's outline. 

Here are my current thoughts about chunking the inquiry into the Question: How does Technology Mimic Biology?

Part 1: Behaviours of Light Inquiry

-begin with 1 question on why light behaves the way it does, prompted with 24 hours to brainstorm
-then experiment with light equipment to better understand the behaviours of light and how technologies manipulate light to perform complex tasks

Part 2: Eye Dissection

-last time we started with too much emphasis on students finding and using resources

-this time we'll limit the inquiry, but maximize the learning that can come out of the dissection

-kWL for parts of the eye (k and w) done prior to lab, L assessed for thinking competency

-give lab guide after some work with K and W 

Part 3: Compare and Contrast Cameras and Eyes

-questions together follow around functionality of eye (under conditions similar to camera - light at various focal lengths, varying levels of light...)

-next independent questions? of camera design (aperture, shutter speed, focal length relative to camera size)

Part 4: Design, Construct, Use Pinhole Cameras

-research and find designs
-detailed sketches
-light meter apps
-experimentation